Our ability to adapt to life is shaped by how well we can relate to it.
How intimate we are with our experience of life the better able we are to make choices that will serve us.
This series of articles contains practical invitations to explore life in potentially more intimate ways.
For the sake of ease I have separated the idea of relating to living into three areas – bearing in mind that this is a provisional division, and that in reality all sides overlap.
The areas are: The World, Relationships, and Yourself.
The Value of Living
Intimacy is a quality of closeness and depth in relating. It is a quality of knowing something, or someone, in a way that you know the pattern of them really well. If a person, you can recognise them by their silhouette, or the gait of their stride. You know them so well that you can predict, at least with some degree of accuracy, what they might say in any given moment, or what they will have for lunch, or how they will act when surprised.
Intimacy with place is knowing where the secret passages are hidden. Knowing where to find the best cafes and the shadiest trees at the height of the summer sun.
As for intimately knowing yourself, this is knowing how you will react, or at least how you will feel and maybe want to react. You will know when you are relaxed enough to let go of that thing that no longer serves you. You will also know when a thing or a person is worth fighting for. You will know what treasure feels like to the touch and the scent of a lost cause. You will know how many hours sleep you need to make it through a day unscathed. What food makes you want to sing, and what music moves your feet to dance.
Intimacy is a quality of relating that requires openness and honesty, and a desire to connect in a deeper way.
Intimacy in an innovation to know the truth of a thing.
Such truths can lead us to places that are indeed very beautiful. Looking closer at anything can invite wonder and magic into our lives. Staying with some thing, some place, or someone, over time – when we are truly present with it – invites us to see a level of depth and detail that reveals the true complexity and intricacy of things to us. The act is both profoundly subtle and subtly profound.
Truth can be challenging and uncomfortable too, even frightening at times. As such, as with all invitations to explore life, take care when you travel. It is no bad thing to walk to the edge and take a look beyond but remember to hold the hand of any part of you that is not as sure as the adult you have become. If in doubt know that there are bridges that can be built.
By the same token, any benefits you gain from exploring these invitations will be yours to own.
Who Are You?
Rain is made by the fall of water through the sky.
A table and chairs placed together contain their own unique set of potentials, especially when mixed with a group of people. They can become a place for a meal or a banquet. The site of a a meeting, or the beginnings of a wild party. They might be where a heist is planned, or, with enough blankets and sheets, they provide the the skeleton of a children’s den.
If we know these things as potential it is because we already have a relationship to them. We can imagine the potential even if we have not experienced them directly.
We know what we know of the world, and what we don’t know, we are still in a position to learn. This food I like, this food I don’t. This thing burns, this thing soothes. This person cares, this person doesn’t.
From this knowing you make the choices that steer your course through life.
In your willingness to discover and explore, to become more intimate with life, lies other potential.
Practical Intimacy
Living leads us to an understanding of the meaning and the value of things.
You learn where to find food and shelter, and good company when you need it. Those of us who are so inclined seek to learn about the internal dimensions of being too; Thoughts, feelings, emotions, fantasies, dreams, aspirations, goals, fears, and desires. All are parts of a richer landscape of life.
The better we can relate the better we can adapt, and the better we can adapt and create, the better able we are set to survive and prosper in life.
When things go wrong for us in life it is often because of how we are relating, or, more to the point, how we are not relating to what is actually going on.
This generally plays out in one of two ways – between two ends of a spectrum, where there is seemingly too many choices or none at all. At one end life appears so chaotic and unpredictable that we can’t make enough sense of it to choose where to go next. At the other life seems so predictable and fixed that we feel trapped, not free to choose at all.
The way to resolve this appears to be in how we adapt to these states.
How well we adapt is shaped by how we relate, and how well we relate (the more intimate we are with it in other words) the more potential we have of perceiving our options more clearly. In this way we increase our chance of finding those parts that will bring more order to the chaos, or, that will let us see those options that will allow us break free of restriction. Of course, this can play our in a rational way, where we work though these things, or an intuitive way, where our intimate knowledge of living nudges us from within, where we follow a gut instinct, or follow our nose so to speak.
Either way, the key is to start where you are at and to go with what you have got. As they say, when life gives you lemons make lemonade, or, Limoncello, or, better still, Tarte au Citron.
The Invitation
The three posts that follow provide a short guide to living life in a more intimate way.
Each article contains 12 exercises.
Feel free to play with them. Experiment. Try them in isolation or in combination. Be as creative as you like. They are not definitive, nor are they intended to be exclusive and if they inspire you in other ways, then I’d be interested to hear where they lead.
They are a simple offering; a simple invitation. A place to start.
Here they are then:
ONE: The World.
TWO: Relationships.
THREE: Yourself.
Have fun and enjoy.
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